


Network

by Mab (Mab_Browne)



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Aliens, Community: spook_me, Dubious Consent, Horror, M/M, Tentacles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-27
Updated: 2012-10-27
Packaged: 2017-11-17 03:29:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/547149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mab_Browne/pseuds/Mab
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something very strange lurks under Cascade and Blair and Jim find it.  Written for Spook Me 2012</p>
            </blockquote>





	Network

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Runrigger, Math-Magician and Ande for beta services. All mistakes after their efforts are entirely my responsibility.

Network

The fog was thick, even for fall in Cascade, creating crazy nimbuses that played with Jim’s sight as they walked down the road to the truck. Jim blinked and shook his head a couple of times before deciding not to look at the dandelion heads of light.

Blair saw the head-shaking. “You’re okay?” he asked, his head tilted in concern, his hand pressed against Jim’s back, too short a press through his gloves and the layers of Jim’s sweater and jacket to leave warmth, only steadying pressure.

Jim nodded. “I’ll be fine so long as I don’t look too hard at the lights. The mist makes them go weird.”

“How weird? On a weirdness scale of 1-10, how does it rate?”

Jim grinned the satisfied smile of a man given an opening. “Not as highly as my weird roomie.”

“Oh, that’s funny, Jim. No derailing of science, okay?” Jim unlocked the truck and Blair got in the passenger side and settled down like a man in an armchair in front of a fire “Tell me again why I live in Cascade,” Blair said. He took off his gloves to blow on perpetually cold fingers, before he thrust them at the air, barely warm, that was starting to blow out of the heater. “It’s some kind of reverse climatic aphorism – it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity, except it’s not the heat, it’s the cold, and the damp, and the-“

“Chief.” Jim pulled away from the curb, frowning and glad for sentinel advantages in the low visibility.

Blair made a complicated gesture with his hands, shoulders and mouth. ‘Sorry, I know I’m like a broken record, but _man_ , I am cold,’ it said. Blair was good at letting his body do the talking. Fine droplets of water had beaded on his hair in the brief walk from home to the truck, and the growing heat from the dash just emphasised the wet-wool smell of Blair’s plaid jacket. “One of these days, there’s going to be a stake-out somewhere warm and tropical,” he said, his voice dreamy. “With comfortable chairs, and....”

“It’s called a stake-out, not a vacation.”

Blair put his gloves back on; they were bulky and hand-knitted with a grey and white pattern on the backs. “Really good at popping my bubble, Jim. So I guess it’s no rest for the wicked.”

Jim turned onto Everidge Avenue, the headlights glaring blindly into the mist. Jim suspected he’d see almost as well if he simply turned his lights off altogether. The slope on Everidge was steep, and for a moment, it felt weirdly like the truck was falling. It gave Jim a start of anxiety, before he told himself he was being stupid, and calmed. “Doesn’t explain why there’s no rest for us,” he muttered, but he turned his head towards Blair, who caught the movement and smiled.

“I never made any claims to clean-living.”

“That’s true. That algae shake of yours is pretty wicked.”

Blair made a yakkity-yak gesture with one hand, a deeply familiar communication. Jim had yet to figure out how he was the one who deserved the ‘talks too much’ treatment. “It keeps the stamina up.”

“Like you need any help with that,” Jim said.

Blair shifted on the seat, a preening stretch limited by the confines of the cab. “Yeah, well, I’m always willing to give advice and support to the lovelorn and the old.”

“You know, Sandburg, at some point we won’t be on the city dollar any more, and when that time comes, when you least expect it? Expect it.”

“Sure, Jim. Whatever.” Blair sounded singularly unthreatened. “Oh, now that is amazingly creepy.” They’d arrived in the poorly lit commercial area that was their destination, and the orange glow of the streetlights leached into the lonely white blankness of the night. Jim reversed into a drive along the side of a building that partially sheltered the view of the truck from the street, and turned off the lights and engine. It was very quiet, except for the distant howling of a dog, and the growl of a souped-up car coming down the hill behind them.

“Someone’s early,” Jim commented. 

Blair peered into the fog. Jim doubted that Blair could see even the glow of the lights that he could. “What, already? The meet’s not supposed to be for an hour.”

“Looks like the early bird catches the worm.”

“Tweet,” Blair said, before Torres’s car swept past them and drove about a hundred yards up the road to stop outside an old factory. Torres emerged from his car, which was low-slung and pimped-up. Jim grinned mirthlessly – that was a pretty good description of Torres too - and then he concentrated on listening. Torres let himself inside through a side door, to an area which must have been open and wide. His footsteps sounded hollowly within the building, and his occasional curses that Jonas was late became lost in the empty spaces.

Jonas came from the other side of the road access, his vehicle a smooth, anonymous sedan, his clothes expensively but conservatively casual. Jim noted all of this before he handed the camera to Blair.

“Okay, Chief, let’s get the proof that these two boys are here together, and then I’ll listen in for the inadmissible part of proceedings.”

He started the truck’s engine, and drove it slowly, quietly, along the road, giving Blair a chance to photograph the evidence that the tip they’d had was good. Blair kept up some soft monologue that Jim barely registered, concentrating on Torres and Jonas’s conversation.

“I have a problem,” Torres said, and the hairs went up on the back of Jim’s neck. “I have a problem with cheating bastards who think that they’re going to fuck _me_ up the ass.” Jim had already jammed on the brakes at ‘bastards’. He was out of the car and running before Torres had finished his sentence. His feet were pounding on the curved, cracked drive in front of the building while Jonas’s bluster turned to muted, begging terror, and Jim’s hand was on the half-open door when one shot rang out. Blair, not so far behind him, swore breathlessly; his gait never faltered, which meant that he’d catch up to Jim soon.

“Cascade PD! Come out with your hands up!” Jim shouted, standing one side of the door, listening for the sounds of Torres’s footsteps, for the catch of breath that might signify speech or action.

“Fuck,” Torres said, and turned to flee further into the building, his steps a heavier thud on the concrete than the slump of Jonas’s body.

Jim didn’t lower his gun. “Damn it.” 

Blair waited at the corner of the building, his eyes huge, before he sidled along the wall. ‘I’ll keep behind you,” he promised.

“You’ll stay outside,” Jim snapped, and threw himself inside, cautious despite the tell-tales that Torres was already nearly out of this space, warehouse, loading area, whatever; Torres was kicking at a door to try and get out, mouthing panicked curses. Jonas lay crumpled on the concrete floor, an irregular halo of blood around his shattered skull. There were only a few lights on, and the open space was dim. Jim sighted across it easily. “Freeze,” he bellowed. Torres only cut sideways down another exit, and Jim followed, tracking the man easily by the sound of his feet and his breathing, tracing the fear stink like a dog on the scent. But he went carefully. Jim didn’t know why Torres was so fearful, or why he hadn’t tried to turn and shoot. He wanted to apprehend him – to have the satisfaction of cuffing him and reciting the Miranda, but not if the price was a bullet in either him or Blair.

Torres didn’t stop to shoot. He just kept on running, until Jim tracked him to the edge of a opening in the hillside behind the factory. It was light enough to him. Blair had gamely followed in the dark, and had taken a couple of falls for his trouble.

“Service tunnel?” Blair gasped, eyeing the security gate that hung badly askew.

“Looks like it.”

“Why there?” Blair stared doubtfully at the nearly impenetrable darkness that sat like a solid thing only a matter of feet beyond the entrance.

“Who knows why punk-asses like Torres do the stupid things they do?” Jim stared down the tunnel, but even he couldn’t see much. Hearing, though, hearing was primed and acute, and Torres was making pretty good time for someone who hadn’t carried a light. Maybe he was using the glow from his cell, Jim thought. He turned to Blair. “What do you say?”

“Oh, you have to be kidding me,” Blair said. “Down there? On a foggy, moonless night with no flashlight? Following a dangerous criminal with a gun?”

Jim grinned. “Yeah.”

“You’re crazy.” But Blair’s smile broadened in the gloom. “Lead on, man. Someone has to keep an eye on you.”

Jim took a step forward, as Blair looped a couple of fingers through one belt loop on his pants. “Already owe me for these jeans,” Blair muttered. “Are you going to try the bat echo thing?”

“Maybe. But it’s better if you’re quiet.”

“Okay.”

A small voice very deep in the back of Jim’s brain was protesting that this was a really stupid idea – but he was willing, and Blair was willing, and somehow the dark before them made him feel committed, like a kid facing a dare and unable to back down.

They walked into the tunnel. It was roughly rectangular with a slight angle toward the roof(‘trapezoid’, Jim’s memory of long ago math lessons supplied) and it smelled of mould and something greener and fresher. Jim put out his hand to touch the sides of the tunnel. The cushions of moss and soft feathering of lichen died away not far from the entrance. Where the concrete was uncovered it was pitted with age under Jim’s sensitive touch and their footing was rough and cracked. Blair’s breath was noisy and he alternately dragged at Jim’s pants waist and butted up against him and kicked Jim’s heels.

Jim stopped short. “What is it?” Blair whispered. His voice was a sharp hiss in the dark, and his body behind Jim’s was limned in heat.

“There’s an opening here,” Jim said softly. The feel of a soft current had alerted him, and his hands traced out the shape of the space; it was almost exactly round, and about a yard in diameter, the top of its perimeter about Jim’s shoulder height.

“Is it big enough for a person? Did Torres go down there?” Jim could feel Blair leaning around Jim’s shoulder as if he had a hope of seeing in the dark. 

“Yes, but no, Torres didn’t go down here.” Jim felt relief. His misgivings about the recklessness of being down here were beginning to rise, and something about that smooth, regular gap in the tunnel gave him the chills. “Chief, this is a bad idea. Either Torres is out the other side, and gone, or else he’s trapped.” Jim shook his head. Why hadn’t this seemed so self-evident before he took the two of them down here? “Come, on let’s get out of here.”

Blair seemed about to open his mouth and disagree, but then he shrugged. “Okay.” Then his grip on Jim loosened. “Did you hear that?” It was such a strange thing for Blair to say. ‘Did you hear that’? Who was the sentinel here? “I thought...” Blair sounded confused, and then Jim heard various disparate sounds – almost together, caught in sequence so quick that he could barely say which came first. There was a dry, smooth rustle, Blair’s gasp of fright, the knocking of heels against an edge of concrete. These sounds all melted into each other, but quite discrete and shocking was Blair’s scream.

“Jim! Help me, man! You gotta help me!”

“Sandburg! What the hell is going on?” Jim wheeled. There was a hole in the darkness around him, that ought to be filled with one sturdy, dependable friend, and Jim lunged to that hole in the wall. “Sandburg! Blair!” There was silence. No. Not quite silence. Jim could hear, as maybe nobody else could, a quiet slither of friction, the sound of Blair being taken away. Crawling at speed was a skill that Jim hadn’t forgotten. He threw himself into the tunnel and followed.

The tunnel was smooth and dry, even where it appeared to be have dug out of mere soil, always flush, sometimes almost polished from what Jim’s hands could tell in the dark. It was dark, smothering and impenetrable, but Jim crawled grimly on for long, long minutes. He found Blair’s shoe, missing it with his hands. It stuck into his leg instead, and Jim zipped his jacket and stuffed the shoe down it. Blair would need it when Jim found him.

The lost shoe gave Jim no pause for thought beyond existing terrors, but when he found Blair’s jeans, his jacket, all the rest of Blair’s clothes strewn in the blackness, he stopped for a moment. His hands were shaking. His body ached, and his eyes ached from trying to see anything in the dark. Blair’s clothes stank of terrified sweat. Jim suspected that his own clothes would reek the same way, but he waited only long enough to efficiently make a bundle of Blair’s things. His movements were the only noise now. That long, taunting rustle of movement had ended now, and Blair had voiced nothing since that first, fearful cry. Jim forced himself on.

At first he thought that maybe the tiny lessening of the darkness was an optical illusion, like the misted lights above that might as well not exist for all the reality that they had for Jim here. It wasn’t even light, precisely, just a greying of the space ahead of him, until finally it was light, and the tunnel opened up into a space barely high enough for Jim to stand upright in.

The light was very dim, counting as light only in comparison to the darkness behind Jim. The room was rounded somehow, no corners, no angles, just gentle curves making a lop-sided, flattened egg. There were filaments threaded over the wall in arabesque curves, and Jim had the impression that they made the light. There was no glow to them , nothing so obvious as brightness, and in the greyness, Jim saw something lying on the ground. It looked like nothing so much as an enormous flower bud: its stem extended from the one other opening in the room. It was brown and fibrous looking, like dried flax, hundreds, thousands even of strands that made a bulbous shape on the floor the size of a large man.

Jim dropped to his knees to what might pass as the tip of that gigantic bud, or the mouth. The top tuliped out and caught at the very centre of the frill was a thin lock of curly hair. “Oh my god.” Jim’s voice came out a thin, flat thread itself. “Oh my god.” He ran the lock of hair between his fingers, before he placed both hands against the shape on the floor and shoved with all his might. “Sandburg!” he shouted. “Do you hear me? Sandburg. Dammit, you answer me! You say something! Sandburg!”

Something writhed beneath his hands, but it was surface, only the inconsequential wrapping. How did Blair breathe in there, Jim wondered. Did he breathe? Jim swallowed back words and listened, let hearing burrow under the layers of thread and filament to hear... no breathing. “Oh, fuck,” Jim muttered. He was cold. His skin prickled. “Oh shit, no, no, no...” Then _his_ breath caught. There was no breath, but there was a heartbeat. Fast, but steady, and Jim tore at the thing in front of him in a frenzy, but he couldn’t get any purchase. The nail on his left hand’s third finger tore away in the desperate scrabbling, but none of it made any difference. Blair remained cocooned; his heart continued beating against all possibility when he must surely be suffocating , and Jim followed that impossible beat, which drummed in his ears until it was all that there was to hear, all that there was to know. Zoned.

~*~

Jim came back to a familiar voice, the only important voice, and the leaden weight pressing down on his awareness lightened. He was on his knees, and Blair knelt in front of him, cupping Jim’s jaw in gentle hands while he talked on and on. “There, you see, knew you’d come back eventually.” Jim blinked, and Blair grinned. “Whoa, that was a good one. I haven’t seen you go out like that in a long time. Years, maybe literally. You’re okay?”

Blair was naked. The shock of that did a lot to bring Jim back to full awareness and memory. “What about you? What happened?” Jim looked around him for Blair’s bundle of clothes. “I’ve got your things, we’ll get out of here.”

He stood. The shape he remembered, the bulging shape so reminiscent of some gigantic flower bud, was gone. Instead, there was a thick mat of fibre on the floor, and Blair in the middle of it.

“Come on, Chief. Get your clothes on and let’s go. I’ve had enough weirdness for one night.”

Blair looked apologetic and a touch embarrassed even, the sort of embarrassment that Jim had seen on his face before when he felt Jim was behaving inappropriately, the face of someone who doesn’t want to upset someone but has to point out an error.

“We can’t go yet.” He stood and stepped forward, naked as the day he was born. He was jittery, thrumming with some deep, anxious emotion that didn’t appear to have anything to do with the lack of clothes. “It’s kind of hard to explain, but I’m going to try.” 

Jim frowned. At first he thought that Blair had picked up something from the floor, something stuck sweatily to his butt, easy enough to brush off, a jokey, silly thing. And then he felt sick.

“Stand still,” he gritted out, and put on hand on Blair’s shoulder. Then he walked around to look at Blair’s back view. He stared for a long, painful moment. “What....” His mouth was dry. “What is this? What the hell is this?” What it looked like was a vine, the width of a garden hose. It was apparently inserted in Blair’s asshole. The origin of it was lost in the mat of fibre on the floor.

“Well, I did say it was hard to explain,” Blair replied, his voice matter of fact as if he was trying to explain some esoteric, but ultimately sensible, everyday concept.

“Chief. I... Can I take this out?”

Blair shook his head in vigorous denial and backed away a step or two. “No, you can’t do that, man, bad idea.” Then he calmed and put out a hand in a gesture that Jim suspected was meant to be reassuring. “ Come and sit down, you’re looking a little shaky there.” It was Jim’s turn to back away.

Jim had felt like this before. Not often. In battle sometimes. When he’d seen Blair go down with that crazy’s bullet in him the time they went after Quinn. His face, he was quite sure, was very, very calm but fear was screaming inside. “ _You_ sit down, and you wait, and I’ll bring help back,” Jim said, faking a clipped surety. He’d go, he’d get help, and Blair would be okay, they would both be okay. He took two steps towards the small tunnel that had led him there.

Under his feet, all around him, the fibres, the tendrils, _moved_ and with the rustle of dry grass moving in a wind they slithered across the floor and rose up across the small tunnel’s opening and made a rough matted net that blocked the way. Jim swore, vicious curses, and tried pulling it apart with his hands. His muscles strained and everything in his upper body hurt but the entrance stayed blocked. Jim flinched as Blair laid a hand on his shoulder, and whirled away.

“What is this?” he demanded again.

Blair’s eyes were wide and his hands lifted, the fingers spread; he was a man who’d seen wonders, but the wonders left him unsettled. Frightened even. Jim could smell it on him, hear it in the hard-beating heart.

“It’s big,” Blair said. “Which I mean in both a literal and a metaphorical sense, because it’s, well, it’s big.” Blair’s hands shook into claws, like he was trying to grasp an idea. “Cosmic,” he said eventually. “It’s literally cosmic.”

“I don’t see anything cosmic about something up your ass like someone’s hand up the back of a muppet. Is that even you? Or is it your cosmic friend talking to me?” Jim bitterly reflected that Blair at least needed to be on some metaphorical leash. He remembered how he’d been so determined to follow Torres, against all common sense. He hadn’t needed a leash – just a little nudge.

Blair reached out. “It’s me, and the reason you know it’s me is because I’m _talking_ to you. Yes, it wants something from us, but it’s not so bad, it’s something that I think would have happened one day, eventually, it’s just it’s going to be now, that’s all. Not so bad, not really.”

“What?” Jim asked. “What does it want?”

Blair grimaced, pure Blair, a ‘duh, Jim!’ look on his face. “I _am_ naked.”

“No.” Jim was backed hard against the smooth curved wall, and his hands were clenched.

“It would have happened eventually, Jim, we’ve just moved the timetable up a little, that’s all.” Blair’s voice was coaxing.

“No,” Jim repeated. “I don’t care what might have happened one day, this isn’t happening now.” 

There was a fine sheen of sweat on Blair’s face. “Jim. Please. Believe it or not, and I really get how not believing is your thing right now, I’m trying to make this work out, because it just... it needs and that’s all it knows , and it’s getting impatient, and if you could just get with the programme.”

“And what’s the programme, Chief?” Jim’s voice came out as a rasp. “Are we going to roll up together inside - whatever this is? And then what? Two flies inside a Venus flytrap?”

Blair shook his head. “No, no. It’ll be okay, I promise, we’re going to get out of here, we just need to do this first. It needs people with a connection, a certain type of energy, metaphorically speaking. It needs _union_. Do you get me?”

“No,” Jim said. His voice was a weak thing, as weak as his body. “No, I don’t get it.”

Jim had shut his eyes, but he could feel Blair approach him – his body heat radiated out and laid warmth on Jim’s skin which was terribly, terribly cold. Then Blair’s hands cupped his shoulders, and Blair stood close against him. “It was always going to happen,” Blair murmured. Maybe Blair was right, Jim thought. Maybe it would have happened one day. A kiss instead of a smile, in the truck, by the kitchen island at home. Home, Jim thought longingly. But instead of the loft’s familiarity there were only Blair’s lips on his, and weight of his hands on Jim’s shoulders as Blair pushed and pulled them close enough to kiss. That kiss was the closest thing to light that Jim could find in that weird, dim chamber, and he opened his mouth, if not his eyes.

Something tugged at the leg of his jeans, and Jim broke away, and opened his eyes at last. “Tell your new best friend that I can take my own damn clothes off,” he growled. 

Blair smiled, relieved, and anticipatory. “It’ll be okay,” he promised, and offered one affectionate peck on Jim’s mouth before he moved back to give Jim room. Jim turned his head away, checking one last time that the way he’d come remained blocked. It did, and Jim took a breath and stripped off his jacket. He placed it carefully on the ground (on the ground, on one of the few bare spaces that wasn’t covered by whatever it was that shared this room with them). His sweater followed, and then his shirt and his undershirt. There was a dry rustle behind him and panic overtook him again. This was crazy. What the hell was he doing? He turned to remonstrate with Blair, to tell him just how insane this was. Blair sat in the middle of a mat of tendrils, which had already moved enough to make a form something like an opened flower. Blair sat cross-legged there, an unlikely Buddha at the centre of an obscene lotus; both his arms reached to Jim in encouragement, but his smile was tremulous. 

Jim stripped off the rest of his clothes with numb, cold hands, and stepped onto the flower, the thing, and sat beside Blair. “Now what?” he asked. His voice caught on the end of a shiver that crossed his body like a ripple.

“Now this.” Blair knelt up and kissed him, his arms wrapping around Jim’s shoulders in a warm, firm grip. He pushed Jim back so that he lay down. It was almost comfortable, but the sensation of movement under him started Jim shivering again. Whatever Jim lay upon shifted gently like a small boat on the water. The back of his neck lay against one of Blair’s arms, and Blair laid several dry, gentle kisses over his face, before Jim stopped him with a hand on his jaw.

“You’re just as scared as I am,” Jim said, a flat statement.

Blair shrugged. There were lines of strain around his eyes, and he still smelled of terror. “It’s weird. I never said it wasn’t.”

“But cosmic?” Jim asked. The tendrils, the threads were all around them, lifting in a roof above their heads and the only light, such as it was, came from the opening at Jim’s head.

Blair laughed, shaky and scared. “I’m glad it’s you. But then it wouldn’t have happened if it was anyone else but you.”

Jim wanted to ask what ‘it’ was. Was it this moment; was it that might have been moment in the truck or the loft? But he didn’t have time to ask. Instead, he said with the resignation of absolute panic, “It’s going up my ass.” It didn’t hurt; it simply didn’t stop. Even with sentinel sight the light was nearly gone. It was growing darker and the only anchors were Blair’s voice, and Blair’s fingers tightly linked amongst his own, Blair‘s right hand under his head, Blair’s weight pressing into Jim.

“It goes in your mouth too, it’s all right, it’s how we’ll breathe, don’t be scared,” Blair murmured, but Jim could feel how he shoved his head hard against Jim’s, face to face, bone against bone, while they were covered and encompassed and the light was snuffed, and something, very carefully but completely inexorably, forced its way down Jim’s throat.

~*~

There were things Jim would never remember. He was touched intimately with the tiniest part of a great body that extended many hundreds of miles, filled with its thought, filled with its loneliness. Abandoned in the way of its kind to make its own way, it would prove its right to survive by making itself all the foundation of this world, and with that it would find strength for the great search for fellow minds, for the great communion across the void. But for now, little minds were solace and energy, fertility and growth in both symbol and actuality. Jim would never remember how he was reassured that it loved the little minds, the little loves and the little communions, those tiny, joined lights that would slowly, so slowly, make the netted tracery of a future sun of joining. He would never remember how he stirred restively in the dark, close embrace, how Blair’s hand clenched, how they were consoled with the thought that it was all a very long, long time away, centuries, nothing to concern them now. 

~*~

Jim’s cheek was cold, and wet, and scraped against something rough when he moved. He groaned. His eyelids fluttered, his lashes a gentle tattoo against his skin, and he woke enough to shove himself onto his hands and knees. “What…” Last night. He remembered going down the tunnel after Torres, and then memory simply stopped. There was a dim grey light around him, which frightened him for a moment until he realised that it was daylight diffused down the tunnel. Jim looked frantically around him; Blair lay nearby and Jim scrabbled over the wet, hard concrete to his side. Blair’s breathing was steady, and he woke as Jim gently shook his shoulder, and stretched with a shudder.

“Oh... oh man. What happened. Are you okay?” Blair’s arm shot up to grab at Jim’s shoulder.

“Easy there. I’m fine. You?” But Blair looked fine, smelled fine (if a little ripe), sounded fine.

“What... did we fall asleep? Here?” Blair’s voice rose on a note of disbelief.

“I doubt it was sleep.” Jim rubbed a hand over his face. “Some sort of gas leak?”

Blair frowned. “How the hell should I know? I don’t have a headache, but I don’t usually take naps chasing murderers either. What time is it?”

Jim checked his watch. “Nearly seven. “

“No wonder I feel like shit. All night in a concrete tunnel?” Blair’s voice became nervous. “Where’s Torres?”

Jim stood, all his body protesting the movement, and leaned one hand against the damp tunnel wall. ‘That’s an excellent question, Chief.”

“And do you have an excellent answer?” Blair had struggled up onto his knees, and was brushing the tangle of his hair back from his face when he twisted suddenly to look behind him and then sat back down, bring his feet in front of him. “Oh, great. I’ve lost a shoe. I can’t believe this. Weird shit, and I couldn’t lose a cheap shoe, no, it had to be the expensive sneakers.” He also struggled to his feet. “And god, I feel wiped, which I guess is hardly surprising when you’ve spent the night sleep-“ He broke off as Jim set off further down the tunnel. “Hey, hey, man, do not leave me here.” He made as if to follow, but Jim put out his hand to stop him, and then realised that Blair couldn’t see that well in the dimness.

“Stay where you, are Chief. I think I’ve found Torres.”

“Is he alive?” Blair asked, a reasonable question given that Torres was silent. Torres would never speak again, Jim noted, because a bullet had blown his brains out.

“No, he’s not alive. The main question is whether he killed himself or whether someone did it for him. You stay back.”

“Got it. No contaminating the crimes scene by slipping in something disgusting in the dark.” 

Jim turned his back on the remains. Blair was a shadow against the pale light coming from the tunnel entrance, and Jim laid his hand on Blair’s shoulder, just to feel someone warm and alive. “I knew I’d get you properly trained eventually.”

Blair leaned towards Jim, who suspected that it was the same search for comfort that motivated his own hand on Blair’s shoulder, and laughed. “Yeah sure. Or maybe I just don’t want to spoil my socks. Can we head outside, where there’s real daylight and no dead bodies?”

“Yeah. Let’s do that,” Jim said, and gently turned Blair around to point his face into the light.

~*~

One day, after Jim parked the truck in a spot near Prospect at the end of a long day, Blair muttered, “Screw it,” and leaned forward to take Jim’s face between his hands, and plant a kiss on Jim’s lips, in Jim’s mouth, that could absolutely not be explained as either platonic or fraternal. Then he let go, his breath noisy in the dark, and his eyes huge.

“So that’s my move, Jim. Any thoughts or questions?”

After one startled look at Blair, Jim stared at the dash. His heart was going fit to bust, but the warmth that bubbled in his gut was happiness. “What? Is this a lecture? A pop quiz? I’d have thought a red hot lover like Blair Sandburg would have something a little smoother in the way of moves.”

“Well, sooor-ry.” The words were offended, the tone was relieved. And maybe that was happiness that Jim heard in Blair’s voice too. “So I was nervous. I’m still nervous, although I have to admit that I’m getting the feeling that you might not be entirely unreceptive to my advances.”

Jim turned in his seat then, and took Blair in his arms. “Advances. _Advances_?”

Blair grinned, entirely happy instead of nervous all in a moment. “Hey, you’re a traditional guy in some ways. Especially your vocabulary. You get kind of folksy sometimes, man.” 

Only Blair, Jim thought, and touched his forehead to his friend’s. “And your traditional approach to me is to lay one on me and then interrogate me?” Jim cupped Blair’s face and stroked his thumb along the strong, high cheekbone. “Folksy?” he inquired in mock offence.

“You know what, I would like to get this weekend la-di-da on the road. At home, if you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I think I have a clue, Chief.” Jim got out of the truck and took a breath of cold, Cascade air. The late fall night felt suddenly a lot more welcoming. He followed Blair inside, watching the quick, anticipatory stride, and thought that he’d always known this would happen. One day. It had just been a matter of time.

~*~  
The sex was always good, but the best sex, the greatest sex.... The first time Jim had realised that he wanted something more, he’d been terrified but driven, and he put the idea to Blair. And instead of looking repulsed, or even merely interested, Blair had looked him in the eye, fired with relief and desire for something that they both needed.

It was only now and again, once a month or so. Maybe with someone else, Jim might have felt self-conscious about the toys, the dildoes, the gags, the gorgeous book on shibari that Blair found somewhere, and that Jim occasionally looked through while his skin flushed and his cock rose. It didn’t matter who did what in the dark, who was fucked, who was restrained, whose cry was muffled by the hard, possessive thrust of a tongue in their mouth. All Jim knew was that in these sessions he felt connected to Blair in an amazingly profound way, connected to something unknowable with a completeness that was sometimes almost terrifying. 

He couldn’t express it to Blair, not truly, but he knew that Blair felt it too. When he tried once to explain it, stumbling over the words, Blair had tapped a gentle finger upon Jim’s lips. What silenced Jim wasn’t the touch, but the look in Blair’s eyes, the tiny shudder in his body that suggested that Blair held an idea almost too great for containment.

“It’s okay,” he murmured. “I get it. Cosmic. Absolutely cosmic.”


End file.
